Perch @perchingpath@eldritch.cafe

Gayfeather, colic-root, rattlesnake-master, blazing star,( devil's bite, Cahaba torch, prairie-pine,) I took your list to that fireworks store in Upland, gathered & checked off each rocket, then imagined how you'd stare at a forest fire (guilty? gleeful?) as I put them all back.

It's actually super easy for the entire contents of my head to slosh out. I don't know why these folkloric peasants get so smug about it.

Surely anyone who's worked in an academic library has considered methods for disabling the safety mechanisms of the rolling stacks.
Whimsically at first, while plotting byzantine assassinations with a colleague just returned from a budget meeting, then with gremlinic fascination while idling at an unapproached reference desk, then to sate an idle thanatic longing hours past sunset in a winter evening shift.

Avoiding other walkers means meeting broken buildings.
There'll have been a gap in which this gardener's shed was plantless, before the ceiling collapsed and residents of the shattered glasshouse next door crept back in. Like squatting the hospital your grandparents were born in.

Absent from buses, subways, and bars where I can perch on the edge of a stage squinting in dim red light, I read less. I've been snail's-pacing through Sofia Samatar's story collection for weeks despite my thoroughly-whetted appetite for edged elegiacism.

We're a county or two east of the freeze warning, but it's May 9th and I let the wind into the kitchen while I was cooking soup and washing dishes and I & every pot exhaled & filled the room with swirls of mist.

I've been dreaming of interlocked domestic spaces. Climbing out through a row house's window to fall seven feet to the hallway floor of a manor in a field of flowers. Following a straight path that passes through the fences & hedges of backyard after backyard to the horizon.

The woods of I'Cath amplify the regrets of ex-swains with bittersweet shadow-shapes & damp romantic vistas until they're so wracked with ruing their inability to shelter their dear beleaguered Spite that they disassemble into fixtures & furniture with no further intervention.

What greater aspiration could we have but to delight our three evil daughters with a sanguinary citadel of beaux's bones.

(A good cadence from my childhood copy of Domains of Dread:)

Flying to Antarctica as a medical tourist to see penguins and have my heart hidden in a clay jar in a woolen sack in a battered sea chest buried 2 miles beneath Denman Glacier.

I've found positions that ease the pain. The standing ones require my left hand be kept at my nape, though, limiting the attitudes I can convey to those triangulated by cockiness, frustration, & endearing chagrin. Good thing I can get by on those for ages.

I saw this drawing of a 19th c. reptile skull near the start of this spell of debilitating, nauseous back pain, and I'm grateful for its expert manifestation of the feeling my less specialized face can't quite express.

I want to look & feel more like the cover of the Melt! 12".

The vernal pools beep when ready to dispense frogs.

My mother asked why I already had a bountiful supply of nitrile gloves, and I was like, "Oh, they're useful for all kinds of things."

While walking last night I found a texturally camouflaged metal tyrannosaur skeleton and a single pristine jigsaw piece. The sharp reduction of human industry is allowing hidden object puzzles to lay claim to my neighborhood.

Got a big isolation fan here. A real fiend for cloistering.

Reckon someone from the high school jubilantly shotput this chair over that fence when the district shutdown was announced. Probably a student, but I'm not ruling out union faculty.

Corduroy jacket.

Fretting slightly over the gibbous overlap in the Venn of {people I care about} & {people who are constantly touching their faces}.
(Including myself, obviously. I'll have bitten my knuckle & tapped my cheekbone by the time you read this.)